Glacial speed takes on a whole new meaning

For a glacier, New Zealand’s Fox Glacier moves quite quickly, about a metre a week. The resulting rock falls and ice collapse from the terminal face are spectacular – and all the action has been caught on camera.

So if you’ve never had the time or patience to watch a glacier move, you can now see nature at its most powerful, as tons of glacial ice and rock are pushed into the Fox River on New Zealand’s dramatic West Coast. Time lapse photography has captured three months of glacial action, including some dramatic ice falls in this short YouTube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGNtKRbPuE

www.youtube.com/mi5security

Researchers from the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales captured the action using RedEye outdoor surveillance cameras. The Welsh team is studying changes in the Fox Glacier on the South Island in a project to understand the nature of glacial advance, melt and collapse.

The cameras, which were supplied by Auckland-based security firm, Mi5 Security, are New Zealand’s first wire-free digital surveillance cameras. The Eye series cameras use PSIS, a technique that operates between CCTV and digital still camera modes. This allows images to be captured and stored in high resolution with the usual degradation in quality of CCTV still images.

Fox Glacier, named in 1872 after then Prime Minister Sir William Fox, is located in the Westland National Park on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The glacier which is one of the most accessible to tourists in the world, is about 300 metres deep and 13 kilometres long. Its outflow forms the Fox River.